The extensive transformation of social structures and public powers started in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the 80's has urged the European Group of Public Law and the European Public Law Center (now European Public Law Organization), since their respective foundation, to envisage the introduction in the heart of the European Review of Public Law of a special series of studies entitled Central and Eastern European Legal Studies.

A structural change has been carried out with regard to this publication, which up to now had been a special edition of the European Review of Public Law.

With a view to reshaping this effort and to advancing even further its image and scientific input after the lapse of almost 15 years since the Central and Eastern European Legal Studies (CEELS) was launched, the Series has been reshaped first through the establishment of its own Board of Editors, composed by renown academics from countries of the Central and Eastern Europe as well as from Western European countries, all of them specialized in this area.

The aim is to give the opportunity to academics coming from CEE countries and also to academics from other countries specializing in this field, to come together and exchange views on public law issues of these countries.

This will be a publication appearing twice a year and in order to expand to a wide circle of readers articles will be accepted in English, French, Russian, German, Italian as well as in the native languages of authors coming from CEE countries (including the Turkish and Greek languages).

Lithuania, Albania, Armenia, Ukraine, Slovakia and Georgia are among the countries represented in the second issue of the Central and Eastern European Legal Studies of the year 2015. The first article is a study on the Accession Process to the European Union in four countries of the Western Balkans: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYROM and Kosovo. Croatia is a member of the EU since 2013, after having succesfully implemented the Copenhagen Criteria, while the three other states are on their way to the EU, with different time horizons. The purpose of the second article is to analyze the features of political parties in the Republic of Lithuania, the procedures of establishment, registration and termination of political parties, and the legal guarantees of activities of political parties. Special attention is given to the legal regulation of financing and control of financial activities of political parties. The third article is about the rethinking of parenting, taking place thanks to the advent of technology that now allows the control of forms and time of birth with techniques of assisted medical reproduction or artificial insemination. The paper proposes a quick study of the historical and cultural reasons that led to this change, which in addition to legal consequences, leads to a real anthropological change in the conception and in the approach of a child. In the fourth article, it is attempted to provide brief answers to some international legal issues concerning the Armenian Genocide. In particular, issues such as whether the Armenian Genocide was a crime under international law, Turkey's responsibility for the committed crime and the opportunity to appeal to the International Court of Justice are examined. The fifth article considers the events that took place in Ukraine and especially in Crimea in February and March 2014 that led to the annexation of Crimea by Russia. The purpose of this article is to determine whether Russia's intervention in Crimea was in compliance with international law. In the sixth article, the author comes to the conclusion of the necessity of incuding the concept of the drug industry in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia as a separate crime, that will give the society, through law-enforcement organs, a possibility to implement in full measure an effective fight against this type of illegal and profitable business. The seventh article focuses on the problem of crime counteraction policy on the ground of modern criminal activity nature in Ukraine. Crime is viewed as a relatively rational, but destructive form of adaptation to the social and economic disparities. It is necessary to shift from combatting crimes to reducing the functionality of deviant social behavior. The eighth article claims that the ECJ has on several occasions confirmed that contracts between contracting authorities cannot be automatically presumed to fall outside the application of EU public procurement law. The rules for the application of in-house exceptions formulated by ECJ were codified in Article 12 of Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement. The criteria for a public contract to fall outside the scope of public procurement rules are: sufficient control criterion, activity criterion and no private capital criterion. In the ninth article, the author analyzes the methods of public and contractual regulation in the field of labor law in the modern times of menage. It is maintained that the increased role of the contractual adjustment is related to the development of social partnership in Ukraine, the aim of which is the peaceful settlement of the interests of legal subjects, the search of compromise in taking decisions on collective labor disputes, the provision of a social world and a harmonious society. The final article refers to one of the inchoate crime problems, particularly, to the distinction between criminal attempt and mere preparation and general punishment of mere preparation. All mentioned legal issues are analyzed towards Herzog's case, which clearly introduces the paper's supportive approach towards criminalization of general preparation.

There are nine articles in the first issue of the Central and Eastern European Legal Studies for the year 2015 coming from Ukraine, Austria, Germany, Turkey, Slovakia, Latvia, Georgia and Lithuania. The first article is devoted to the issues of formation of limited government in a sovereign Ukraine. The analysis of its experience confirms that the existence of democratic institutions and procedures is not sufficient safeguard against the usurpation of power. Attention is focused on the importance of formation of the constitutional system of limited government in Ukraine based on the European model. The second article is about how generating a thorough and trusted status of information is a priority for effective and coordinated disaster management and relief measures delivered by GOs and NGOs in the surroundings of a critical event. The QuOIMA-project, funded by the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology, focuses on the various possibilities to use publicly available, open source data generated in the sphere of traditional and social media. One of those means is the new and emerging crowd tasking approach, a promising and high potential area for the involvement of community members. The third article is a study of the constitutional and statutory law-provisions as well as the Rules of Procedure of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo, one of the youngest Constitutional Courts in Europe, which reflects the standards of most such modern institutions. The purpose of the fourth article is to introduce the long constitutional solution-seeking period of Turkey by referring to historical, legal and political developments, and to evaluate the constitution-making process after the parliamentary elections in 2011. The fifth article, coming from Slovakia, argues that the addressees of legal norms have a legitimate right to expect that any restrictions on their fundamental rights through the legislation are the result of broad discourse in which all of the participants had been given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the matter under consideration and to present their informed opinion. In the sixth article, the author explains the theory of the fundamental rights in the Republic of Latvia, the content and basic rules of locus standi to be observed in order to submit to the Constitutional Court a special type of petition - the constitutional complaint. By examining several conclusions, which follow from the case law of the Constitutional Court, the author attributes particular importance to the decisions with ex tunc effect proving that these allow considering the constitutional complaint as a real weapon against the state and unconstitutional laws. The seventh article aims to highlight political and legal issues and media campaigns relevant to the referendum on the so-called traditional family held in Slovakia in 2015, which was deemed invalid because of insufficient turnout. The penultimate article is a broad comparative analysis in the field of rule of law that draws on a wide array of case law from various Central, East and Southeast European Constitutional Courts. It illustrates that those are far more than guardians of national constitutions, but actors in the European Integration process of their countries. The final article deals with the problem of implementation of the principle of long-term budget revenues planning in the Republic of Lithuania. It analyzes the legal definition and the essence of short-term and long-term budget revenues planning and the reasons for transition to long-term revenues planning.

Albania, Greece, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine are the countries represented in the seven articles included in the second number of the year 2014 of the Central and Eastern European Legal Studies, 2/2014. The first article, coming from Albania, examines the balance between freedom of expression and protection of reputation. The former is explicitly provided in Article 10 of the ECHR whereas the latter is entailed from the Convention as a limitation to the freedom of expression. However, the European Court of Human Rights ruled several times that both are guaranteed equally, without any hierarchy between them. The second paper examines the constitutional protection of ownership in Slovakia which had occurred in society at the break from socialism to capitalism. Socialist collective ownership existed in two basic forms: State ownership and co-operative ownership. Besides these two basic forms, also small private enterprises and personal ownership of natural persons could have existed. The guarantees of the State onwership by the legislators of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic are also presented in the article. The third article included in this CEELS number deals with the theme of the general theory of national security, which, according to the author who has analysed numerous research papers on the theme, could alternatively be labelled as natiosecuritology from the Latin 'natio' – a tribe, people; and 'logos' – a science, study, movement, while preference is given to the first title. The author maintains that the general theory of national security represents an essential element of intellectual cultures of the mankind. The next paper is devoted to the pilot friendly settlement in the European Court of Human Rights as a special category of the conciliation procedure, as well as to contemporary problems of execution of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights against Ukraine. Another article discusses the questions of whether it is appropriate to establish the age of consent and related issues in the Ukrainian legislation by analysing the relevant provisions of the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse of 2007 and the case law of the ECtHR. Prison-privatisation programmes, facilitated by the international economic downturn, is the subject treated in the next paper: Private prisons are examined in three different European legal systems (English, French and Greek). Finally, a paper deals with the problem of the tax advantages in Lithuanian tax law. Special attention is given to questions of the legal definition and to the analysis of the content (legal forms) of tax advantages. According to Lithuanian tax law, the main legal forms of tax advantages are: tax exemption; decrease of the tax basis; diminution of tax and application of preferential tax rate.

In the first number of the year 2014 of the Central and Eastern European Legal Studies, 1/2014, the countries represented are Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine. The first article, coming from Ukraine, deals with the concept of protective intervention for the protection of cultural property which is analysed from different points of view: State immunity, contemporary doctrinal and practical approaches to the subjective composition of international law, responsibility to protect doctrine, responsibility while protecting doctrine, etc. The second paper, also coming from Ukraine, analyses European Development Aid Law as a body of legal rules that regulate the EU financing of external aid provided to the developing countries and argues that the legal acts comprising the sources of European Development Aid Law could be systematised by grouping into: primary legislation, international agreements and secondary legislation, identifying the legal acts that compose each group. The purpose of the third article included in this CEELS number is to examine the regional governance of Turkey and to identify the adjustments conducive to the financial management of municipalities during the EU accession process of Turkey. The next paper presents the current state of public administration in Georgia within the framework of legislation, practice, ongoing reforms and demonstrates the role of the modern model of Civil Society as an essential element for establishing a democratic state and good governance.